Many telcos have been hesitant to transition their network operations and management to software-as-a-service (SaaS) models that rely on the public clouds, mainly due to concerns about data security. However, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Nokia executives argue now is the time for the telecom industry to seize the SaaS benefits, including data resilience, cost savings, speed and business agility.

Philip Blanchar, senior director of SaaS delivery and operations at Nokia, participated in a panel discussion on Tuesday titled “Demystifying Telecom SaaS Security.” He noted that telecom providers have higher demands for resilience, performance, data availability and security due to their critical role in running the internet and providing internet access to subscribers and carriers. “When telco SaaS is down, all the carriers and subscribers are impacted by the outage.”

Additionally, data security and privacy threats are evolving at an accelerated pace, driven by technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), and making it “extremely difficult” for threat management and compliance.

Blanchar argues these challenges make it the ideal time for telecoms to embrace SaaS and take advantage of hyperscalers’ security offerings.

“It’s the economies of scale that afford a SaaS provider and our public hyperscalar to invest in those capabilities because that's their livelihood,” he said. “You can imagine the level of scrutiny that public hyperscalers and SaaS providers get — not only our own audits and compliance requirements, internal and external audits by third-party assessors, [and] regulatory assessment that is done routinely, but also supporting customer audits of our infrastructure.”

Kal Krishnan, a telecom industry specialist at Amazon Web Services Security, echoed public cloud providers have been investing in security since the early days. “Hyperscalers are able to invest more in security than any enterprise can on its own. We see billions and billions of security data points; the learnings from which [and] the intelligence that we gather from those data points are things that we packaged for the benefit of all of our customers that live in the cloud.”

Krishnan and Blanchar claim AWS public cloud and Nokia’s telecom SaaS offerings can address telcos’ data resilience and security concerns.

“The data resilience and sovereignty are key for telco and telco customers being confident that their data isn't moving around,” Blanchar said.

He touted that Nokia’s telecom SaaS has processes and controls in place that are audited routinely to ensure customers are confident their data remains safe, protected and encrypted within their environment.

Nokia started its SaaS push in 2021, which included the launches of security and analytics features. This past November, Nokia added a 5G core SaaS option for operators and enterprises looking for a simpler way to run a complex 5G standalone (SA) core feature.

AWS has also been pushing into the telecommunications and 5G space; one example is its work with Dish Network to move the operator’s Nokia 5G standalone (SA) core to run in AWS’ public cloud environment.

And Krishnan touted that the design of the AWS global infrastructure, with regions around the world and each region having multiple availability zones, is key to the cloud's resilience.

“If there were an outage in one region, it would not infect another region. This highly resilient infrastructure allows telecom applications to achieve their resiliency objectives and, most importantly, at price points that would be very hard to compare to on-premises deployments,” he explained.

However, application resilience does not automatically follow infrastructure resilience, and “this is where our partnership with Nokia is so vital,” Krishnan added.

“They work with us closely to understand how to leverage the power of that infrastructure to build resiliency on top of that. And so as a telecom operator, when you use a SaaS model from a reputed provider, what you're effectively doing is leaving the undifferentiated heavy lifting, as we call it — things like resilience and patching and vulnerability management, all of that — to the experts and you can focus on your business,” Krishnan said.